14 books and three months of reading followed up by targeted practice can advance your career further than a master’s degree in marketing. Education needs to be disrupted. Marketing is a good place to start.

Marketing is not an art, talent and intuition are not mandatory to excel in the field. Marketing is barely a science. You don’t need to study it in academia to succeed. Marketing gives various answers to the question: how to motivate the recipient of my message in the best form to take an action favorable to my cause. Nothing more and nothing less.

Motivation, recipient, message, form, action. Each of these words offers countless options that can be linked to options from the others. The mathematical possibilities combined with rapid developments over time make Marketing a challenge. How to do it? …

“Everyone’s a genius. But if you judge a fish by how well he can climb a tree, he’ll think he’s stupid all his life.” — Albert Einstein

Jim Kwik was the kid with the broken head. After a serious accident, the boy had difficulty learning, was not attentive and could not concentrate. He was bad at school and became increasingly shy. He toughed it out, worked harder, only to despair at university. Thanks to a key encounter, he discovered “that we learn everything, but never how to learn.”

For the next 20 years Jim Kwik devoted himself to learning. …

We implemented an automated marketing campaign and replaced Hubspot with a mix of 10 individual tools and a handmade process, reducing the subscription cost by 90%. Here’s how it worked.

We planned a campaign for a free and transparent micro-donation platform — think Patreon with cents — that has both a Business to Business and Business to Customer element. To market and manage thousands of leads, in our case authors and content consumers, we needed streamlined automation of both inbound and outbound activities.

The industry calls this marketing automation. And the pinnacle of programs to do this with is HubSpot. Its Patrick Mahomes, Simone Biles or Megan Rapinoe all rolled into one super-performing software suite. It can do everything and then some. It is more than software; they have a mini university attached that offers free marketing courses. You even get certificates for finishing these courses. They don’t mean much, but you feel good. They give you a personal onboarding experience and help you get the most out of the sprawling universe of a suite. …

The world’s leading tourism corporation filed for liquidation after years of accounting malpractice. A new accounting technology might have prevented that.

On June 9th 1841, Baptist priest Thomas Cook set out to walk from Market Harborough to Leicester (15 miles) to attend a Temperance Society meeting in the town. On route, an idea occurred to him:

“A thought flashed through my brain — what a glorious thing it would be if the newly developed powers of railways and locomotion could be made subservient to the promotion of temperance.” [1]

For the next abstinence rally, Cook shipped 500 teetotalers for the price of 1 shilling each to Leicester. Thus, professional tourism was born. For the next 170 odd years the company of the same name went the extra mile to find and claim the most exotic destinations. With that antecedent, the irony cannot be lost that Thomas Cook has now declared bankruptcy for not finding the truth in their accounting. …

I had the exciting experience of recruiting three software developers for my blockchain startup tender.buzz. I received about 150 applications for each position and realized that there is quite some competition out there. I want to share my conclusions to help you stick out from the crowd and land your dream job. I will share some things that you don’t find in the usual how-to-apply articles.

1. Understand the recruiter’s position

I dealt with 450 applications in total. This number makes it clear that I have to create a process that streamlines recruiting. I can’t spend too much time with an applicant before I receive the necessary documents. It is ok to ask for clarification of unclear issues in the job description. But I am already losing time when applicants just tell me that they are interested and like to speak to me. I can’t handle that. I have to decline 85% before a talk.

Make sure to be among those promising enough for a talk.

2. The CV comes last

CV’s are not what will get you the position or even an invitation to talk. I only look closely at the CVs of those applicants who comply with a few other things first. …

Rebecca Portnoff from Berkley University created an algorithm that can track sex traffickers with the help of Bitcoin.

Many prostitutes do not offer their services voluntarily. They are often abducted, sold and forced into prostitution. This range of services is shifting more and more to the Internet in order to offer the prostitutes convenient and secure access to human goods. Bitcoin and science can help distinguish sex trafficking from voluntary services and uncover the people behind it.

Step 1: the offer

There are a lot of websites with sex offers. One of the largest in the world is the classifieds site Backpage.com. Previously, detectives had to manually read thousands of ads a day to find out where sex trafficking might be involved. This is very time-consuming and, of course, very stressful for the psyche of these readers. But what is the evidence for sex trafficking? …

Did my headline get you interested? I sincerely hope so, otherwise, I could not fulfill the promise. Although rules should always be broken, it is good to know them to begin with. For this article, I have looked for people smarter than me who could explain what I did for 15 years with more or less accurate intuition. Most reflection comes from advertising buffs but when it comes to headlines, their word is good for all writing. Here are a few simple ideas to get your headline right.

“Unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.“ …

I have collected the best wisdom from countless books on trading, sifted them through the strainer and used them to bake the 12 golden rules.

1. There is no win-win situation

Think back to the seesaw on the schoolyard. Two children rock up and down. There are two states. Either one child is up and the other is down. Or they balance themselves in the middle under a lot of strain. That’s how trading works. Sometimes nothing happens and the courses balance in the middle under a lot of strain. However, every time a trader makes a profit, a different trader takes a loss. The seesaw cannot be up on both sides. Simple physics. The question is: Why do you think you’re better than your counterpart?